Focus On... Gasoline

A barrel of crude oil has limited value, if any, to consumers. Its true value is the number of value-added products that can be extracted from the crude oil using various chemical reactions and separation methods. Thus, the refining operation is the first step in the transformation of crude petroleum oil into consumer products. So what are the possible products from a barrel of crude oil Figure 18.6 lists the average breakdown of a barrel of oil by a United States refinery. As shown in Fig. 18.6, over 75 percent of the product yield from a refined barrel of oil is fuel based. In this example, United States refineries are focused on gasoline production, whereas European refineries focus on diesel product. Yet, refineries can also produce value-added petrochemicals for adjacent facilities. 

Although focused on gasoline operation, the fuel processing system will utilize fuel-flexible reforming technology that can be modified to accommodate fuels such as methanol, ethanol and natural gas... 

The flowscheme of the typical refinery during the period 1950-1970 was essentially focused on the production of gasoline, diesel oil, domestic heating oil and industrial fuel-oil. Except for heavy naphtha, the product streams underwent no deep conversion. 

Future technology developments in paraffin alkylation will be greatly influenced by environmental considerations. The demand for alkylate product will continue to increase because alkylate is one of the most desirable components in modern low emission gasoline formulations. Increased attention will be focused on improving process safety, reducing waste disposal requirements, and limiting the environmental consequences of any process emissions. 

Refining (Chapter 3 Focus On) The process by which petroleum is converted into gasoline and other useful products. 

Most mechanistic work has focused on chemical reactions in solution or extremely simple processes in the gas phase. There is increasing interest in reactions in solids or on solid surfaces, such as the surfaces of solid catalysts in contact with reacting gases. Some such catalysts act inside pores of defined size, such as those in zeolites. In these cases only certain molecules can penetrate the pores to get to the reactive surface, and they are held in defined positions when they react. In fact, the Mobil process for converting methanol to gasoline depends on zeolite-catalyzed reactions. 

GM has a multi-year collaborative research agreement with ChevronTexaco to advance fuel cell technology and gasoline processing for fuel cell vehicles. This will accelerate GM s gasoline-fed fuel cell vehicle to retail customers. GM also has an agreement with Suzuki Motor Corporation to collaborate on fuel cell vehicle development, focusing on small cars. 

Therefore, much attention has been focused on improving the FCC process to simultaneously produce cleaner gasoline and more propylene. Based on the... 

The ban on the use of leaded gasoline in the 1970s produced one of the most successful episodes in the search for the control of air pollutants. As already noted, the concentration of lead in the air dropped dramatically and to very low levels within a matter of years after the ban was put into place. Currently, efforts to control lead emissions focus on improving the methods used to remove lead from air and water wastes of smelters, metal processing plants, and other such plants. The most common systems currently used are variations of traditional waste control techniques in which physical devices (such as baghouses) or chemical systems (such as precipitation reactions) are used to extract particles of lead from wastes. 

Although liquid hydrogen, LH2, can be used as a fuel source, much of the recent fuel cell research is focusing on the partial oxidation of methanol, natural gas, ethanol, or gasoline to produce the necessary hydrogen. Catalysts that aid in the partial oxidation of these fuels yields a readily available, rich source of hydrogen. Water is the primary exhaust emission produced by fuel cell powered vehicles. If a carbon-based fuel source is utilized, then a carbon-containing by-product will also be produced. 

The study of the desulfurization of model oils, predesulfurized diesel oil, and FCC-gasoline focused on extraction by halogen-free ILs (alkylsul-fates of alkylmethylimidazoliums) was reported in Ref. 45. The highest DBT partition coefficient was observed for [C4CiIm][C8S04j. After four extraction steps, sulfur concentration in the oil decreased from 500 to 10 ppm. 

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